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posted by Dopefish on Sunday February 23 2014, @08:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the where's-carl-sagan-when-you-need-him? dept.

pjbgravely writes:

"Scientists use gravity lensing measurements to determine mass of galaxy clusters. Anja von der Linden, an astrophysicist at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University in California, is using the Subaru telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope, both on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The results are 40% higher than the measurements done by the Planck collaboration.

I guess there goes Douglas Adams' theory that the missing mass was in the packing material of the scientists' equipment."

 
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by maxwell demon on Sunday February 23 2014, @12:30PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday February 23 2014, @12:30PM (#5164) Journal

    Thanks for the links. However the scitechdaily article is contradicted by a later one:

    http://scitechdaily.com/new-measuring-technique-su ggests-plenty-of-dark-matter-near-the-sun/ [scitechdaily.com]

    Relevant quote from there:

    In this latest study, the authors are much more confident in their measurement and its uncertainties. This is because they used a state-of-the-art simulation of our Galaxy to test their mass-measuring technique before applying it to real data. This threw up a number of surprises. They found that standard techniques used over the past 20 years were biased, always tending to underestimate the amount of dark matter. They then devised a new unbiased technique that recovered the correct answer from the simulated data. Applying their technique to the positions and velocities of thousands of orange K dwarf stars near the Sun, they obtained a new measure of the local dark matter density.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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